Command to access scroll wheel of the mouse and use it to move through slices of a CT scan

[ashwink47]

I have been working on designing a DICOM viewer (to view medical images like CT scans and X-rays) using Psychtoolbox on MATLAB. I want to move through slices of a CT image stack using the scroller wheel of the mouse. One resource I came across was the GetMouseWheel command. This does not work on Windows. The other mouse control commands GetMouse and GetClicks do not provide complete control of the scroll wheel for the functionality that I’m looking to achieve. Does anyone know a solution or workaround for this? Are there any other commands that provide control of the scroll wheel that I’m unaware of? Can the scroll wheel of the mouse be configured in a particular way to make it accessible using specific keyboard commands?

Is there, for example, some unusual hardware that feels like a mouse (from the user perspective) but which can be read as a joystick or gamepad? Maybe something developed for MRI or EEG or something else that is unusual. Thanks for any help you can provide!

[mariokleiner]

The search function of the forum is a wonderful thing. It brings up nuggets like the following one in no time:

How to read mouse wheel in windows 10

Hi Tom, the best way to do this would be to (ab)use KbQueues, which can record mouse axis motion, and sometimes as a 3rd axis also mouse wheel motion. This should work on Linux and Windows, but not macOS. See MouseMotionRecordingDemo.m for a starter: http://psychtoolbox.org/docs/MouseMotionRecordingDemo -mario

This is a bit of a hack, to work around deficiencies of MS-Windows api’s. On Linux, GetMouseWheel provides a more elegant solution.

-mario